Lucy's Book
A Critical Edition of Lucy Mack Smith's Family Memoir
LAVINA FIELDING ANDERSON, EDITOR
(with an introduction by Irene M. Bates)
Hardbound. 968 Pages. / 1-56085-137-6 / $44.95

BEST BOOK AWARD, JOHN WHITMER HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION; BEST DOCUMENTARY BOOK AWARD, MORMON HISTORY ASSOCIATION

Mormonism begins with Lucy Mack, mother of the prophet Joseph Smith. In her dictated memoir, readers will detect the same seeds of religious fervor and frontier idiom that characterized her son's writings and sermons.

Although much of her original voice was lost through editing in the more formal, first published edition of her memoir—14 percent of the overall content having been discarded—Lucy's original manuscript survives and is presented here for the first time in its entirety. For comparison's sake, it is arranged in parallel columns with the first (1853) edition. Significant variants from later printings are indicated in the editor's footnotes, with prefatory chapters that provide historical background and textual genealogy.

Lucy's story is gripping and occasionally heart-breaking. As Irene Bates notes in the foreword, the memoir is given "to a new generation of [Lucy's] spiritual grandchildren" as both history and as inspiration. By restoring passages that relate Mother Smith's own, personal understanding of important events, her reactions to them, and her portrayal of Mormon women as competent and strong (a theme that was removed from later editions), editor Lavina Fielding Anderson has allowed Lucy to say what she originally intended.

"Am I indeed the mother of a prophet of the God of Heaven?" Lucy asks in the rough draft of her memoir. She answers in the affirmative. Yet her question conveys an intimacy that is absent from the polished, final version of her book. Dictated to a scribe, her spontaneity creates an ambiance that allows readers to picture her sitting in her rocking chair in Nauvoo, Illinois, reminiscing with a friend. This sense is heightened by her scribe's phonetic rendering of frontier slang. For instance, Lucy worries about "the measels and other ketchin diseases," rendered as "contagious disease" in the final version. She describes her son coming "upon a green sward under an apple tree," saying that, "Here he lay down"—flattened in the printed version, eliminating the word "sward." Where Joseph's brother says, "We must keep to work," this becomes in the published edition, "We must not slacken our hands."

But literary issues aside, Lucy's original narration carries significance due to what it says, and does not say, about Mormonism's founding, in corroborating what other family members and early converts reported. For instance, she uses the terms "dream" and "vision" interchangeably. She remembers that her son's famous first vision occurred in his bedroom at night, echoing the well established tradition of her husband's own prophetic dreams. The line dividing the physical and spiritual blurs further when Lucy tells that when her son retrieved the gold plates of the Book of Mormon, he was accosted three times by three different individuals, each of whom jumped up from behind a log, struck Joseph "a heavy blow" with a gun, and then allowed him to escape. The reader is left to wonder whether these were men or devils.

Not that such distinctions between the supernatural and material world would have mattered to Lucy, who lived comfortably in both. A popular novelist in her day, von Goethe, described a young man spending a day in the country and sensing unseen spirits that held sway over his emotions, and proclaiming that "God in His Infinity bears us aloft in perpetual joy." Lucy similarly felt that she was often "in the purview of angels," and her heart "bounded at the thought." Though "surrounded by enemies," she was "yet in extacy [sic] of happiness"; and "truly," she said, "my soul did maginify and my spirit rejoiced in God my savior." Her ability to express the reality of this spiritual world and the intensity of her emotional responses make her, among a handful of eyewitnesses, one of the most compelling chroniclers of early Mormonism.

Lavina Fielding Anderson (Ph.D., English, University of Washington) lives in Salt Lake City with her husband Paul, a museum exhibit designer at Brigham Young University. They have one son. She is the editor of the Journal of Mormon History, co-editor of the Case Reports of the Mormon Alliance, current-issues editor of the Mormon Women's Forum Quarterly, and production editor for the Review of Higher Education. She is a past president of the Association for Mormon Letters. She has been an associate editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought and of the Ensign magazine. Her books include (as editor) Chesterfield: Mormon Outpost in Idaho; (co-editor) Sisters in Spirit: Mormon Women in Historical and Cultural Perspective, Tending the Garden: Essays on Mormon Literature; (contributor) On Their Own: Widows and Widowhood in the American Southwest, 1848-1939; Religion, Feminism, and Freedom of Conscience: A Mormon/Humanist Dialogue; The Wilderness of Faith: Essays on Contemporary Mormon Thought; and Women and Authority: Re-emerging Mormon Feminism. She is a recipient of the Grace Fort Arrington Award for Distinguished Service from the Mormon History Association.